Vote count in obscure GOP race changes yet again

The vote count in a little-known Boston race has yet again changed, now nearly 13 months after the final ballot was cast and a few days after a court-ordered recount.

The Boston Election Commission on Wednesday voted to accept the tally of March 2020’s election for the Massachusetts Republican Committeewoman from the 2nd Suffolk District, with Nicaela Chinnaswamy leading after this past weekend’s courtmandated recount.

No, that year is not a typo — this race was on the ballot last March 3, which was the Massachusetts presidential primary date during last Super Tuesday. And after last weekend’s recount found many new write-in votes, the election commission had to correct the record again on Wednesday after accidentally giving one of the candidates 15 nonexistent votes in the recount.

The seat’s in a particularly Democrat-leaning portion of brightblue Boston that includes Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, so there weren’t many GOP voters. But somehow — the Boston Election Commission hasn’t said how — the commission found 112 more write-in votes between the three candidates, nearly quadrupling the number of votes it had registered as having been cast.

The initial count had Chinnaswamy at 25, Rachel Kemp at 9 and Eleanor Greene at 6 votes. But that Chinneswamy total wasn’t enough — a write-in candidate has to get 50 votes to be seated. So MassGOP chief Jim Lyons and a caucus of other state committee members seated Greene, the more Lyonsaligned candidate, in the position.

Chinnaswamy sued, seeking a recount — and eventually got one, with a Suffolk Superior judge this March 4 ruling in favor of a recount, which took place on Saturday.

After the day’s count, the tally stood at Chinnaswamy 65, Kemp 52, and Greene 50. But then the MassGOP called the city up and noted that there was a discrepancy: The city had awarded 15 ballots noted as blanks in the ward count to Kemp in the final count. So at Tuesday’s meeting, the final count was read off with Kemp actually having 37 votes.

“We have recounted and confirmed all the tallies are accurate,” Boston Election Commission Chair Eneida Tavares insisted at the Wednesday meeting before the commission voted to accept the results.

Lyons, who over the weekend called for the entire election commission to resign, was still fuming on Wednesday, saying that the misses in the Republican vote count in the various districts of the 2nd Suffolk are a disturbing “pattern.”

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Lyons said. “We deserve election integrity, and we deserve our votes to be counted.”